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The War They Call Peace

As of 9 July 2021, ten years after independence, South Sudan lies in ruins. A civil war that began in 2013 has razed many of the country’s cities, displaced millions, and left entire regions at the edge of starvation. A peace deal, signed in September 2018, only succeeded in returning the main belligerent parties to Juba, the country’s capital. From their perches in a transitional government, the commanders who waged the last civil war continue to clash across the country. What a difference a name makes. Hostilities are now depoliticized as disarmament campaigns or else dismissed as ethnic violence by the billion-dollar UN mission. The UN is keen to cling onto a narrative that sees the peace agreement as a success, despite the fact that its own agencies have found that the level of violence in the country has increased since 2018. It insists that there has been a reduction in ‘political violence’, points to regrettable inter-ethnic conflicts, and suggests that it is the government’s responsibility to police them. Whenever researchers point out the involvement of national politicians in the supposedly local violence scarring South Sudan, the UN plays a credible Captain Renault at Rick’s, announces its shock, and redoubles its support for the government.

This was not the plan. A decade earlier, on 9 July 2011, dignitaries visited Juba to congratulate themselves on the creation of the world’s newest state. This despite the fact that South Sudan’s new ruling party, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), had fought a twenty-two-year-long civil war against the Sudanese government in Khartoum, and that it was the southern Sudanese who had voted to secede from their northern neighbour. For the Americans, British, and Norwegians involved in the peace agreement that ended the civil war, South Sudan was their baby. A World Bank report written shortly before independence brought these neonatal fantasies to their colonial apotheosis, hailing South Sudan as a tabula rasa. There are no roads, no markets, and no institutions, the report stated, and, as the consultants’ eyes gleamed, added: they will need to be created. For the internationals who thronged through Juba’s airport, eager to build a new nation, that South Sudan was terra nullius obviated any need to learn something about the country. Cookie-cutter approaches to statehood and simplistic tales about a victimized Christian south, now free of the yoke of the northern Islamic oppressor, were more functional than a real understanding of the region’s history. A state needed to be built, consequences be damned.

The SPLM’s leadership profited from international ignorance. An enduring aspect of the SPLM’s story is its ability to turn the – often simplistic, if not simply racist – tales outsiders tell about southern Sudan to its own ends. It is equally adept at manufacturing stories destined for external consumption. The SPLM’s first leader, John Garang, was a master in this regard. A charismatic politician with a PhD from Iowa State, Garang started the SPLM in 1983 with a plea for revolution in Khartoum. (Southern independence, diplomatically a lower-hanging fruit, emerged as a goal in part thanks to American pressure.) The incoherence of Garang’s later statements was not the result of insufficient hours in the library, but an appreciation of discordance as a diplomatic tool of the trade. Rebel movements in Sudan have always been reliant on manipulating external supporters. Garang could appear Marxist to the SPLM’s Ethiopian backers and then, following tectonic regional shifts and the collapse of the Derg regime in Addis Ababa, miraculously become the paragon of national self-determination that his American cheerleaders wished him to be. He died in a helicopter crash just after America forced Khartoum to sign a peace agreement in 2005. Amid the disasters of the Middle East, this was to be an easy American foreign policy win. The agreement guaranteed southern Sudan six years of self-rule and a referendum on secession in 2011. Salva Kiir, Garang’s successor, inherited none of his charisma, but all of his ability to manipulate self-regarding foreigners. From 2005–11, as oil revenues and donor funds flowed into the south, Kiir cultivated adoring foreign state-builders, eager to see their dreams of a new nation-state play out. He got into the act himself shortly after independence. South Sudan, he claimed: it’s a tabula rasa!

It wasn’t, of course. Britain took thirty years to pacify southern Sudan, principally via indirect rule, as it classified the region’s many groups according to ethnicity, while setting them against each other. At independence in 1956, northern Sudan, more urbanized, and putatively Arab, was ready to continue British policies, and use the south as a backyard from which resources and labour could be extracted. Sudan’s first civil war (1955–72) had begun the year before independence, pitting the northern elite against the marginalized peripheries of the country. The war ended with socialist dreams of development in the south, aspirations that died when the financial crises of the 1970s hit Sudan, and Khartoum collapsed under its debt burden. The second civil war (1983–2005) began soon after. According to the just-so stories pedalled at South Sudanese independence, the war pitted the northern Sudanese state against rebel groups in the south. In reality, the north borrowed a trick from the British, and set southern populations against each other in violent ethnicized conflicts. For Khartoum, this was war on the cheap. Oil had been discovered in southern Sudan in the late 70s, and the north sponsored militia forces under the command of Paulino Matip to fight the SPLM and clear populations from around the oil wells. Elsewhere, multiple militia groups emerged, frequently changing sides, as they manipulated the winds of regional favour. From the outside, this looked like an intense case of divide-and-rule, the north setting southern groups against each other. Inside southern Sudan, if it’s true that Khartoum manipulated southern commanders, those same commanders also used regional support to build up their own personal empires, transforming the social structure of the region.

Whether commanders were cadres from South Sudan’s largest ethnic group, the Dinka, loyal to the SPLA (the militarized wing of the SPLM), or members of Matip’s militias, largely drawn from the Nuer, the second largest ethnic group in the country, they used weapons from external backers to manipulate humanitarian aid, control cattle and grain markets, and position themselves atop a war economy. Endowed with weapons, they predated on local populations, enriching themselves at the cost of South Sudan’s farmers and pastoralists. Geopolitically dependent on external forces, fighting against each other, these commanders were nonetheless engaged in a process of class formation. It was this militarized class that took over the southern Sudanese state in 2005.

Once the second civil war came to an end, humanitarian supplies were supplemented by more lucrative sources of income. Oil revenues and donor funds went into the pockets of commanders who built a rentier economy predicated on the redistribution of external income to armed supporters. Superficially, a modern, liberal state was being created under the watchful eye of the Adam Smith Institute. Sub mensa, the project of class formation that had begun during the war continued apace. Commanders displaced hostile populations, rewarded loyal constituencies with NGO development projects, and attacked opponents under the guise of disarmament and demobilization campaigns. If in Juba the international community dined out on imported wine and mozzarella in restaurants next to the Nile, in the rest of the country, the civil war continued.

It wasn’t just that the UN and the diplomatic corps were wilfully blind to the travails of the country outside the capital; the very form of the peace deal signed in 2005, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), encouraged this process of class formation. The CPA was a bilateral framework between two belligerent parties: the SPLM and the Sudanese government, and excluded all the militias who had fought against the southern rebel movement. It ignored the fact that for much of southern Sudan, the SPLM was an occupying army. The agreement left no space for political discussion and was designed to move along in a strictly technocratic fashion. This left the problem of all the militia groups around the country. Kiir took a leaf from Khartoum’s playbook and decided to buy them off.

In 2006, the Juba Declaration brought Matip’s militias – amongst many others – into the SPLA, rewarding ephemeral loyalty with petrodollars, and setting in motion a system in which commanders leveraged potential violence into lucrative payoffs. Commanders began to stage rebellions and demand better positions as the price for their reabsorption into the army. The SPLA’s ranks swelled with ghost soldiers, invented so commanders could augment their salaries. Soon, almost the entire state budget was directed to feeding the war machine. None of this was acknowledged by the intentional community. Formally, the South Sudanese state was being built and the army reformed. Millions were spent on fantastical security-sector reforms, dutifully superintended by international consultants, but meaningless outside the air-conditioned offices of the capital. If military reform was a charade, it was dreamt up in London and D.C., and made money for commanders and consultants alike.

Across the country, an increasingly zero-sum politics took hold. Commanders and politicians made ethnicized appeals to their constituencies, setting communities against each other. The state existed on paper, a thin veneer of legitimacy given by the international community to a predatory elite. Most commentators place the end of this bonanza in 2012, when in a stand-off over oil transit fees with Sudan (the only pipeline in the south runs north), the SPLM turned off the oil, activating what Alex de Waal called a ‘doomsday machine’. Without the money to grease the wheels of the commanders’ impressive 4x4s, de Waal held, civil war was imminent. The system would have imploded regardless. Kiir and his clique of largely Dinka politicians could not have indefinitely afforded to stave off war by continuously increasing rentier payments to commanders, especially given the collapse in global oil prices that would follow in 2014. Alarmed by the numerical dominance of Matip’s Nuer forces in the SPLA, Kiir’s clique had begun building up mono-ethnic militias from amongst their home constituencies, recruited outside the ambit of the army. The development of these private militias was simply a reflection of what the army had become: a collection of commanders bound together only by the common project of enrichment.

By June 2013, facing an increasingly austere financial situation, Kiir had dismissed both Riek Machar, his Nuer vice-president, and his cabinet, and it was clear to everyone except the diplomatic corps that war was on the horizon. Fighting within the presidential guard in December 2013 was the spark that set the country aflame. On one side: Kiir, his militias, and what remained of the oil revenue. On the other: Machar and virtually all of the Nuer commanders brought into the SPLA in 2006. It could have been the second civil war, redux, except a regional realignment had occurred. Museveni’s Uganda backed Kiir’s ruling clique and sent troops to stop the nascent rebel force, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in Opposition (SPLA-IO), reaching Juba. Khartoum shifted sides. Kiir had pushed out most of the so-called ‘Garang boys’, loyal to the dream of a revolution in Khartoum, and replaced them with southern politicians who had served the northern enemy and more amenable to a settlement with Sudan based on shared economic interests in oil and mining. Without an external backer, the SPLA-IO was soon outgunned. One leading rebel general, Gathoth Gatkuoth, now comfortably ensconced in the government, told a UN investigator that he would happily convert to Islam, if only Khartoum would offer him resupply.

The SPLM was always going to win the war. For Kiir’s clique, the conflict was an opportunity to consolidate control of the country. The war continued the process of class formation, rather than interrupting it. Two modes, one substance. From 2005-13, the government had used county-border redistricting to force opponents from their land. When the war began, the government completed the process, carrying out the wholesale ethnic cleansing of opposition populations. The de facto displacements of the war would then be made the object of de jure legal judgments, following the latest peace agreement, sanctifying the land grabs. In some of the country, displaced populations would then be sent back to work the land they had once possessed, this time as wage labourers. To add insult to injury, the food so produced is sometimes purchased from the elite by donor governments, to be distributed to the displaced as food aid. The great untold story of the South Sudanese civil war is that it has been a massive wealth transfer from an immiserated population to a militarized elite, enabled by the international community.

The only people to not see these continuities are the UN and the diplomatic corps, for whom the civil war came as a shock. Seen dimly from behind the international veil of spreadsheets and guarded compounds, the war was not part of their implementation matrix. There was a timetable for state-building, and war rent it asunder. To repair this hole in the web of time, an army was dispatched from what Séverine Autesserre calls ‘Peaceland’. The courtiers of Peaceland are diplomatic corps, international experts in security-sector reform, and the UN. Soon there were innumerable meetings in expensive hotels in Addis Ababa, many a failed ceasefire, and two peace agreements. The formalized technocratic process of these agreements was as wilfully blind to the real political economy of South Sudan as the state-building process, and was instrumentalized just as easily.

By 2018, the SPLA had won a consummate military victory. The second peace agreement – the one apparently now holding – was effectively a negotiated surrender. Machar slunk back to the capital, dependent on crumbs from Kiir’s table. The security-sector reform process currently underway as part of the agreement is a giant pyramid scheme, in which commanders recruit troops with the promise of wages and ranks, just like it was in the good old days after 2005. No such bonanza is forthcoming. The government is keen not to repeat the Juba Declaration and bring Nuer troops back into the army. In any event, the major military power in the country is now a series of mono-ethnic security services directly controlled by Kiir’s clique. The largest of them, the National Security Service, modelled on Khartoum’s secret police, just had its salary paid via a loan from the International Monetary Fund.

In Juba, the elite has formed a transitional government. The class war continues, this time under conditions of austerity. South Sudan’s greatly reduced oil production has already been pre-sold to Emirati and Qatari banks, and in the place of petrodollars, Kiir’s regime dispenses licenses to commanders and politicians jockeying for position. Their income is derived from land, minerals, taxes, and manipulating humanitarian NGOs. One commander I know makes a good income creating prêt-a-porter compounds on land he has occupied and renting them out to NGOs who are supposed to assist the people the commander has displaced. The elite may be a fractious class, but it is very conscious of the fact that its position depends on the veneer of legitimacy given to it by the peace agreement. It’s a farce that suits everyone in Juba. In countless meetings this year, I have had to field questions from eager diplomats, wondering if the time is ripe to start reforming the army again.

The World Bank formally considers the war a disaster, but in many respects, the conflict has accomplished the goals of the organization. Vast tracts of the country are now uninhabited, as populations withdraw to relatively safer urban areas. South Sudan’s population of 12 million is now 20% urban. The empty land that results can be sold off to foreign companies and local barons. The South Sudanese population, displaced into cities, is increasingly reliant on markets for food and wages for income. Over the last few months, protests and riots have spread throughout the country. Youth groups have demanded that international NGOs employ local people or else leave. Warehouses have been burned. In Juba, internationals dismiss these demands as identarian ethnic claims, created by the manipulations of unscrupulous politicians. There is some truth to these statements, but it is none the less notable that even if youth demands are ethnically articulated, they are nationally identical, and a socio-economic mobilization that the international community would like to downplay. There is, after all, a state to support.

Read on: Alex de Waal, ‘Exploiting Slavery’, NLR I/227.

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Seismographs of Struggle

It was not easy finding the exhibition Sismographie des luttes at the Centre Pompidou. There were no posters to announce its presence outside or in the main hall. When I visited one Saturday morning recently, I even wondered if I’d made a terrible mistake, and the show was already over. Asking one attendant I was directed to the fifth floor but the staff up there at the turnstiles looked at me blankly when I mentioned it. So I wandered through the permanent collection and out into a long corridor where, at the end there was a window looking out across Paris and to the left, with no signage at all, a single room held the exhibition.

It was all a far cry from the previous outings this exhibition has had around the world: in Beirut, Cali, Dakar, Rabat, New York. What the Pompidou effort suggests is a discomfort, embarrassment even, at dealing with the subject of colonialism head-on. This is not something that Beaubourg has been known for engaging with since it opened in 1977.

Taken alone the exhibition reflects only a fraction of the extraordinary project it draws from. This began in 2015 under the direction of Zahia Rahmani, a writer and historian based at the Institut national d’histoire d’art in Paris. For several years she has led a small team of researchers dotted around the world who have been working to track down a thousand journals dating from the 19th Century up to 1989. The oldest on the list dates back to 1817 – the Haitian literary and political journal L’Abeille haytienne – and the subjects they cover range from politics and race to culture of all kinds. Every region is represented. The connecting thread between them is their existence within and in some way in opposition to a system of colonialism or oppression.

‘People are not passive, that’s what interested me’, Rahmani said when we met recently, describing her motivation for seeking out these journals. ‘We should give history another path than that which consists in thinking that everything emanates from the declaration of human rights.’

There are so many striking journals in the collection, and to see them revived in this way is moving and inspiring. Some existed for only a few issues, such as Zimbabwe’s Black and White that dealt with racial politics in 1966-67, while others such as the literary journal Sur from Buenos Aires – which treated social problems and was briefly banned under Peron – operated from 1931 until 1992. Others remain in circulation today. The geographical and topical range is remarkable. Indigenous populations from Australia to North America have their place, so too do an impressive selection of feminist publications from the Middle East and Asia, such as the striking Seito founded in Japan in 1911 which tackled homosexuality, drugs and abortion. To go through the list is to have so many new doors opened: one wants to walk through them all. There is the Turkish Šehbāl for example, active from 1909 to 1914, that covered music, philosophy and women’s rights and contained many stunning photographs and illustrations, or the satirical Phong Hóa whose pages were full of sharp-witted cartoons, appearing weekly out of Hanoi from 1932 until it was banned by the French authorities three years later.

To better grasp the scope of the project, and delve further into it, one must turn to the two catalogues published by Nouvelles Editions Place, and above all the online portal SISMO, an invaluable resource that continues to expand as the team’s research goes on. Free to access, anyone can explore the entire list, which leads to full digitalised contents for some, and at the very least a dedicated page containing information on origin, lifespan, language and cover image – so often a gem of graphic design, such as the art nouveau illustrations of Althaqafat alisuria, a journal of Syrian culture from 1934, or the bold covers of Mozambique Revolution that ran from 1963 to 1975, throughout the war of independence from Portugal. 

But the exhibition allows us to see the journals as material objects, complete with yellowing pages and dog-ears that evoke the many hands they once passed through. In the Pompidou’s room a few glass cases display editions of selected journals, highlighting the myriad formats used, from the broadsheet The Black Panther that the party put out, to a review such as Proa set up by Borges in 1922 that mixed sizes, with one issue on display around A5, another just under A2. Seeing all this gives a real and palpable quality to the radical contents of these journals: aesthetic objects that were also instruments of struggle. As Rahmani put it, all those involved in these journals over two centuries

participated in an aesthetic that is not violent. Of course there is violence in the sense that people are fighting, but they are struggling to be able to preserve a culture, or even their language, the possibility of living together, and of not living under coercion. They find release through the journal because it is not a weapon, it is a negotiation . . . and that’s what the installation showed me, that over two centuries there is a temptation to still nevertheless seduce the one who oppresses you, by reminding him who you are.

The contents of the exhibition has varied according to the location, with each space tending to showcase journals that relate to the local context and hold events to encourage people to delve into the issues they raised. None of this at Beaubourg. The selection here is both minimal and flat – the journals are presented as artefacts rather than alive and still the source of relevant debate. Also missing is a table with computers allowing visitors to explore the journals beyond those displayed in the room, something that was a feature at the other locations.

The centrepiece of the exhibition at the Pompidou and elsewhere is a film installation, which is made up of two sets of three still images projected against two walls showing around 450 journals and 900 documents. This runs on a loop to a soundtrack composed by Jean-Jacques Palix, a mixture of instrumental music with archive extracts from speeches made in defence of causes related to the journals. We see covers, inside pages, photographs of founding editors or other key figures. There is also a seventh image projected between the two sets of three with short paragraphs of text telling us about a particular journal, or related quotes. The semi-darkness of the Pompidou setting is another underwhelming choice on the part of the museum. Other venues provided the film installation with the cinematic setting it demands. At the Beirut Art Centre for example, the exhibition was held in such a dark space that it encouraged visitors to sit and watch the film all the way through. And indeed it is worth taking the time to experience the powerful, cumulative effect of viewing these hundreds of examples of printed resistance over more than a century, from all across the world.

The thousand journals are in around 70 different languages, including Creole variations, Mohawk, Tibetan, Zulu, Uyghur and Laotian, to cite only a few. But 222 of the journals are in French, 217 in English, and 199 in Spanish. This forces the question of intended audience ­– employing the language of the ruling power meant that many groups had no chance of reading the articles defending their cause. And it is here that the double function of the journals is evident: their memorial function for history, and their active function, ‘aimed at trying to develop within the colonial system a sensitivity towards them’, as Rahmani put it. ‘What is incredible is how these intellectuals manage this transition, they speak the language of empire, they master it, but they address empire in a critical fashion. It is very courageous’. Courageous is, indeed, the overriding impression one has when looking and exploring all these publications, now given a second life.

Read on: Emilie Bickerton, ‘Planet Malaquais’, NLR 84.

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Back to the Present

In his 2011 essay ‘From Progress to Catastrophe’, Perry Anderson writes that ‘in one of the most astonishing transformations in literary history’, the historical novel ‘has become, at the upper ranges of fiction, more widespread than even at the height of its classical period during the early nineteenth century’. This, he observed, was somewhat paradoxical, for this renewed popularity coincided with postmodernism, the aesthetic regime, as Fredric Jameson put it, ‘of an age that has forgotten how to think historically’. Riding roughshod over the ‘classical form’, taxonomized by Georg Lukács in his canonical study of Walter Scott’s Waverly, postmodern- or meta-historical fiction had succeeded in reinvigorating a genre that, for thirty years after the Second World War, had contributed little more than a ‘few antique jewels on a huge mound of trash’. Linear historical necessity was jettisoned for ludic counterfactuals and chronological violations; romantic-nationalist aetiologies for imperial eschatologies; liberal faith that the clash of social forces would lead to progress with the suspicion that this was nothing more than a conspiracy of permanent catastrophe. Yet here was a case of a rising tide that lifted all boats: alongside these innovations in the genre, ‘more traditional forms have proliferated too’.

A decade later, the historical novel has cemented its status as a literary form. It is a matter of debate whether we have remembered how to think historically again, but owing to the contemporary political landscape, we have at least remembered that we ought to. That the genre, in both traditional and postmodern variants, continues to grow in popularity and respectability ­among Anglophone readers, writers, and awards-committees remains paradoxical, but perhaps no longer quite for the reason Anderson gives. Two defining features of today’s Anglophone literary culture are a moral imperative to enable historically marginalized voices to speak of, for, and by themselves, and an extreme scepticism about the ability of language to represent other minds, especially across the differences occasioned by marginalization. Whatever impact this moral-epistemic antinomy may have on narratives set in the present – where, perhaps not unrelatedly, memoir and autofiction increasingly hold sway – it is in principle fatal to the historical novel, a genre in which the possibility of representing ‘lived experience’ is by definition foreclosed. In her collection American Innovations (2014), the Canadian-American writer Rivka Galchen rewrote canonical short fictions as though they were narrated by women; the resulting pastiches provide a sharp commentary on the gendered assumptions baked in to putatively ‘universal’ works of literature written by men. But in her new novel Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch, Galchen attempts to transfer this approach to a real historical figure, only to get caught on the horns of this contemporary paradox.

Set largely in Leonberg, a small village in the Duchy of Württemberg, Everyone Knows tells the story of Katharina Kepler, mother of the mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, who, in 1615, was accused of poisoning the wife of a local glazer, Ursula Reinbold, and charged with sorcery. She was tried, arrested, had her property expropriated, and spent fourteen months in prison under the threat of torture before being acquitted in 1621. She died the following April, effectively ostracized from the community. Meanwhile, Johannes (defamiliarized as ‘Hans’ in the novel), who took an active role in his mother’s defence, completed his work on the laws of planetary motion, and three Catholic officials were thrown from the top window of Prague Castle, sparking what would become the Thirty Years War, by far the most destructive conflict, measured in terms of percentage of population loss, in European history.

We are reading about Katharina of course, rather than one of the tens of thousands of other women subject to witch trials in Early Modern Germany, because of her proximity to the world-historical figure of Johannes. In Galchen’s rendering, Katherina is a recognizable figure from small town life: a busybody and a know-it-all with a sharp tongue, a speciality in herbal remedies, and a worldview grounded in stolid, peasant wisdom. In another time and place, her combination of ordinary vices and virtues might have made her merely an endearing or irritating neighbour, but as an old woman in the Holy Roman Empire in the first quarter of the 17th century, it left her vulnerable to the kinds of opportunism, resentment, misunderstanding, and prejudice that led to the ordeal that marred her sunset years, and perhaps hastened her death. What makes her an ‘average hero’, in the sense Lukács extrapolated from Scott, is that by refusing to confess to the sorcery charge, she manages to retain her individual dignity in the face of enormous social pressure. What makes her a good candidate for a protagonist in our contemporary moment is that she is not just marginalized from history, but multiply marginalized: she is female, elderly, a widow, a peasant, and also – perhaps most importantly – illiterate.

Given this last fact, the most straightforward novelistic approach would be to employ third person point of view, which would allow Galchen the greatest purchase on her protagonist’s state of mind, as well as a stable chronological point beyond the action from which to telescope her story; in other words, to dispense with a realism of presentation for a realism of effects. This has been the procedure of a number of other recent historical fictions set in the period between the publication of the 95 Theses and the signing of the Peace of Westphalia – Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy (2009-2020), Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll (2019), Éric Vuillard’s The War of the Poor (2020), as well as John Banville’s earlier Kepler (1981), which treats some of the same events. But as this narrative mode would give peasant Katharina a proto-bourgeois (one is tempted to say proto-novelistic) consciousness, and as it would preclude her from ‘speaking in her own voice’, Galchen chooses, in a somewhat postmodern vein, to foreground the ways in which our access to history is always already mediated, and in doing so paints herself into a narrative corner.

Dramatizing a detail from the historical record, Galchen stages the main part of the novel as Katharina’s first person ‘truest testimony’ to her neighbour, Simon Satler, a reclusive widower who is pressed into service as Katharina’s legal guardian and stenographer. The testimony’s plausibility as legal document is blunted by Katharina’s persistent impolitic comments, but worse than that, in order to convey information to the reader, she must tell Simon many things he already knows. (The text is littered with variations on the qualifying phrase ‘as I don’t need to tell you, Simon.’) Then, in order to account for his presence in the text, Galchen introduces a section from his point of view (‘I thought it would be clarifying if I, Simon, explained myself here’, he says, inaccurately), which further exacerbates the narrative’s ungainliness. When, in another awkward concession to the historical record, Simon bows out from participating in Katharina’s legal defence three-quarters of the way through the book, the narrative falls into the lap of her daughter Greta. Interspersed between these sections is a cache of other fictionalized documents, including duelling petitions from Johannes and the Reinbolds, the prosecutor’s summation, and dozens of transcripts of witness testimony from the villagers of Leonberg.

If Galchen’s intention was to centre Katherina, this cacophony of textual mediation produces the opposite effect. Once the trial concludes, Katharina’s rationale for telling her story disappears, and she more-or-less disappears with it. In an epilogue, which takes place ‘twelve or so years’ after the conclusion of the trial, Katharina’s acquittal – which should be the novel’s climax – is treated as an afterthought. ‘What a fool I am’, Simon writes, ‘to forget that a reader might not know the fate of Katharina’. Being a matter of historical record, Katharina’s fate is never in doubt, nor are we likely to take the charge of witchcraft seriously, which means our sympathies are never in doubt either. Whether our preferred explanation is that the witch craze was a remnant of pagan folk rituals interpreted through the lens of Christian demonology (Ginzburg), a displacement of the scapegoat mechanism from other victims – Jews, heretics – onto older women (Cohn), a femicide motivated by primitive accumulation during the transition from feudalism to capitalism (Federici), or something else entirely, it is likely that nearly all readers will hold the view that there are no such thing as witches, that anyone accused of witchcraft is ipso facto innocent, and that, as a corollary, anyone who accuses someone of witchcraft is motivated by some combination of superstition, misogyny, or malice.

This view is shared by some of the characters in the novel – by Simon, for example – but not, for what it’s worth, by Katharina herself. (For Katharina, witches are indeed real – the titular accusation is first uttered not about her, as one might expect, but by her – only she is not one of them.) In an interview, Galchen also expressed ambivalence about it. In the early stages of writing she thought, ‘The only way for this to be interesting is for [Katharina] to be a witch’. In the end, however, she opted for a more contemporary understanding of the figure, according to which, in the words of the interviewer, those who were accused of witchcraft ‘were often just successful or unpredictable women’. This metonymic substitution of personal qualities for supernatural abilities betrays a longing to preserve something of the witch’s power at a symbolic level while retaining our sympathies for her as a real victim of persecution. But as gruesome as they were, the witch trials were ordinary atrocities during a period that saw war, starvation, cannibalism, the plague, pogroms, mass rape, and the wholesale destruction of cities, most famously, of Magdeburg, where, over four days in 1631, some twenty thousand people were put to the sword. Just as being unsuccessful and predictable was no guarantee of safety, being successful and unpredictable was a liability that was not just limited to women, as the cases of Bruno, Galileo, and Johannes himself would illustrate. The witch trial is what creates the witch; much as we might desire otherwise, we cannot have the latter, even symbolically, without the former.

A further consequence of Galchen’s narrative strategy is that the trial produces not only the pretext, but also the conditions of possibility for Katharina to tell her story at all. With one exception, the speech of all the characters is mediated, directly or indirectly, by the juridical apparatus of the nascent European state system. That exception is Simon, whose narrative, having displaced Katharina’s, is mediated instead by the market. The epilogue takes place at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where Simon has come to hawk the ‘important manuscript’ we have been reading, or at least the bits of it he has access to. (In any event, this narrative device cannot account for even the existence of his sections, since Simon is ultimately unsuccessful in selling the manuscript, in part, because he has ‘not figured out how to describe it’ to potential publishers – a startling admission, coming so close to the end of Everyone Knows.) What the Frankfurt setting provides, however, is a direct, institutional connection from the early stages of capitalism to today’s literary marketplace. This, in turn, provides a glimpse of the moment at which enchanted ontology of the Middle Ages is swallowed whole by the commodity form, where it has been imprisoned ever since. Then as now, the battering ram of the new theological-economic order has been one commodity in particular: the printed book.

At the Fair, Simon runs into Johannes’ widow, Susanna, who has come to find a publisher for an unpublished manuscript from his Nachlaß. When Simon first sees her, she is standing between two stalls selling Luther’s pamphlets and Johannes von Tepl’s poem Death and the Ploughman. ‘So the stalls…sold books from a century ago’, he muses. ‘Why no interest in the awful and dramatic present?’ In the mind of one of the characters this thought is an anachronism, but the question of course is Galchen’s. Galchen has dusted Everyone Knows with allusions to our own ‘awful and dramatic present’ (largely to the pandemic) but these do not map neatly enough onto it to function as prefigurative allegory (the most obvious similarities – to #MeToo and to Donald Trump’s frequent references to investigations into his activities as a businessman, candidate and president as ‘witch hunts’ have the inverse moral valences). The part of the present that comes through instead is a comfortable nostalgia, a longing for what we have lost to progress, whose compensations are inevitably taken for granted and are thus – given the persistence in milder form of some of the real defects of the past (plagues, moral panics, gendered violence) – experienced as insufficient and disappointing.

The novel’s thematic contradictions are symptoms of this nostalgia, which emerges most powerfully in Simon’s final meeting with Susanna. The book she is selling is Somnium, an early work by Johannes which folds a treatise on lunar astronomy into a dream narrative. In the dream, a young astronomer, a student of Tycho Brahe, takes a voyage to the moon, with the help of his mother, a herbalist and healer with magical powers, that is, a witch. It is unclear when the details about Brahe and the mother-character were added to the original text, but in Everyone Knows, Susanna claims that they are ‘prophecy’ of the future rather than biographical details added after Johannes’ own work with Brahe and his involvement with Katharina’s trial. What is important here is the future orientation implied by the word ‘prophecy’, as well as the lunar voyage, which has led Somnium to be categorised as an early instance of science fiction. The presence of a real science fiction text in a contemporary historical novel should come as no surprise: Jameson has argued that historical fiction is really a species of science fiction, since the former is nothing more than the ‘time travel of historical tourism’. Of her rationale for writing Everyone Knows, Galchen has said: ‘I was desperate to escape…Even before the pandemic I was just like, I’ve got to get out of this moment. I’m leaving this year. I’m leaving the century. I’m leaving the US’. But as with spatial tourism, in temporal tourism, we always pack ourselves in our suitcase. Our contemporary science fictions are dominated by visions of apocalyptic catastrophe, whereas in choosing to time travel instead to early 17th century Germany, Galchen has allowed readers to escape to a world in which, despite all of its drawbacks, people could be said to hold out belief in and hope for the future. The catch, of course, is that what their future produces is us.

Read on: Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Witches and Shamans’, NLR I/200.

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Majidi in Context

Sun Children, the latest film of renowned Iranian director Majid Majidi, is easily his finest since Children of Heaven (1997). It is also his most radical work in years, taking aim at various aspects of contemporary Iranian society. It follows a group of underclass boys who enrol in school after Ali, the leader of the gang, is tipped off by a local crime boss that there is treasure buried beneath the school building. The children search for it while trying not to arouse the suspicions of the school authorities, yet the precarity of their home lives continually threatens to undermine their project. Drug rackets and addiction have torn their families apart. The parents are mostly absent; when they appear, it is to lambast the children for not working full-time. The school itself is the only institution in the area that caters to children from such backgrounds. Condemned to haggle for pennies from its small circle of donors, at one point the school is temporarily shut down for late rent payments. Like its students, it exists on society’s fringes.

The film’s depiction of Tehran’s poor however avoids didacticism. Instead, it provides an expansive portrait of the city that sheds light on its neglected corners. To find his protagonists, Majidi auditioned almost four thousand children from the city’s poor neighbourhoods – those selected give authentic, heart-rending performances. The narrative is fast-paced, aided by a stylistic trait of regular jump cuts, but the film widens its scope beyond the protagonists to broader political questions: society’s treatment of children, the effects of privatized education on the poor, the exclusion of migrants from the nation’s welfare system. One of Ali’s closest friends is an Afghan boy doubly oppressed by this configuration. Often employed as peddlers and hawkers, Afghan children receive low wages and face periodic police crackdowns in Iran. By attending school, the boy does not realize that he is committing an illegal act which may result in his family being deported.

This is one of several moments where Majidi contrasts the innocence of his child protagonists with the brutal world of politics, which is portrayed as corrupt and exploitative. When the school director signals his intention to run in the city council elections, his colleague tells him that he is bound to become ‘just like the rest of them’. The film is no less sparing in its depiction of the police: when a young girl is caught selling goods on the metro, they shave her head in an act of cruelty. But for Majidi this conflict between child and adult worlds runs both ways. In one of Sun Children’s most ecstatic scenes, the students climb the school gates to reclaim the building from the landlord who has locked them out. The children’s games, and the social ties which they engender, provide a bulwark against the practices of the adults around them.

Given Sun Children’s critical depiction of state authorities and rent-seekers, many western viewers will likely interpret it as a critique of the Iranian regime as such. Yet this is far from the director’s intention. Within Tehran’s predominantly secular and liberal film circles, Majidi is one of the few prominent figures with impeccable Islamic revolutionary credentials. He defends the Islamic Republic at every opportunity, describing the 1979 revolution as an attempt to realise spiritual ideals through political action. At the 2020 Venice Film Festival, he remarked that if the socio-economic situation in Iran compares unfavourably to that of other countries in the region, this was not because of the government, but rather the crippling sanctions imposed by the United States. Majidi is also one of the few directors who has made multiple high-profile visits to the Supreme Leader. It is believed that some of his productions have received financial and logistical support from the Revolutionary Guards.

How, then, should we locate his most recent film politically? It is not a straightforward question, for Majidi does not fit neatly into either reformist or conservative camps. In the 2009 presidential elections he voted for the reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, yet he later cooperated closely with the conservative government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His films stand apart from the social realism of reformist directors like Asghar Farhadi, Jafar Panahi or Mohammad Rasoulof, who are primarily interested in exploring gender roles and family dynamics among the middle classes. Yet they also diverge from conservative directors like Saeed Roustayi or Narges Abyar, who treat spiritual themes of sin and salvation through glorified depictions of the police, military and judiciary.

What most distinguishes Sun Children from both these traditions is its emphasis on issues of labour and working conditions. Child labour plays a pivotal role throughout the film, often in subtle and oblique ways. The protagonists make a living by recycling car parts and tires, while their friends sell cheap Chinese imports to commuters on public transport. Majidi foregrounds the arduous manual work of the treasure hunt, with Ali digging a long tunnel under the school over the course of several days. Work and play for the children often overlap, and although adults occasionally exploit this for their own benefit, they also allow the protagonists to forge bonds of solidarity which seem to bridge ethnic, national and gender differences.

Such themes align the film with the heterogenous ‘justice-seeking’ (edalatkhah) movement, which has become increasingly active in Iran in recent years. Like Majidi, this movement is religious and nostalgic. It campaigns for a return to the egalitarian values of 1979, demanding increased popular political participation and democratic accountability. Led by a cohort of young activists, many of them from poor backgrounds, the justice-seeking movement fills a void left by the defeat of earlier reformist tendencies. As Western sanctions have deepened inequality and intensified state repression, middle-class liberal activism has been beaten back. In its place, this more provincial, religious and working-class formation has emerged. Although the movement remains fragmented, localized and without strong national leadership, justice-seekers have won popularity in part thanks to their strong stance against economic sanctions and American imperialism.

Over the past decade, this coalition has developed through close interaction with Iran’s growing labour movement – itself an outcome of widespread discontent with economic liberalization and the sanctions regime. Students and even clerics have stood alongside a newly mobilized cadre of workers, occasionally joining them in demonstrations and sit-ins. Supportive activists frequently write for provincial and national news outlets, and, through their ties to local government institutions and police forces, are often able to negotiate the release of workers arrested during protests. In the disastrous final years of the Rouhani presidency, they often received the support of Ebrahim Raisi himself – at the time head of the judiciary and, with his eyes fixed on the elections, clearly intent on discrediting the government.

It is perhaps in this nexus between labour, religion and rights that Majidi’s latest work can be best understood. While justice-seeking activists typically marshal only limited support, and while their relation to the incoming Raisi government remains unclear, Sun Children has brought their concerns to the big screen. If Majidi has gained his respected status and political connections by defending the Islamic Republic against its foreign critics, he may now have become an important ally of those seeking to change it from within.

Zep Kalb & Masoumeh Hashemi, ‘Tehran’s Universal Studios’, NLR 121.

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Red Lines

On Monday 21 June the Swedish government fell. It was a strange coalition, voted down by another strange coalition. The administration was led by the Social Democrats (SAP), with the right-wing former trade union leader, Stefan Löfven, as Prime Minister. It included the smallest parliamentary party, the Environment Party, and relied on a confidence-and-supply arrangement with Sweden’s two most neoliberal groupings: the Centre Party and the Liberals. Its parliamentary majority was also contingent upon the votes of the Left Party, which last week withdrew its support, joining with the three conservative parties – the Moderates, the Sweden Democrats and the Christian Democrats – to pass a motion of no confidence. The Centre and the Liberals abstained.

Sweden has a parliamentary system based on proportional representation in multi-member constituencies, with the threshold for representation set at 4% of the national vote. Eight parties currently sit in parliament. The reason for the bizarre political games of recent weeks was a deadlock in which neither the left-of-centre – composed of the Social Democrats, the Left and the Environment Party – nor the traditional bourgeois bloc of Moderates, Centre, Christian Democrats and Liberals, could command a majority.

Until recently the third largest party – the xenophobic Sweden Democrats, with roots in the neo-Nazi and white power movements of the 1980s and 90s – was regarded as beyond the pale. In the other Nordic countries, xenophobic parties have formed governments or been invited into bourgeois coalitions. But Sweden remains more open and tolerant than its neighbours, with a significantly larger immigrant population. In 2018 the Social Democrats had their worst electoral result since the introduction of near-universal male suffrage in 1911, winning only 28.3%. Yet they remained the largest party, 8% ahead of the Moderates. After four months of negotiations a government accord was reached, keeping the Sweden Democrats out, and winning the support of the Centre and Liberals in exchange for 73 separate policy commitments.

These included: maintaining possibilities for profit maximation in social services; dismantling the public labour exchanges that were once the lynchpin of the social democratic full employment policy; changing labour legislation to make it easier to fire certain employees; and abolishing rent controls in new housing projects. The list also contained some modest climate policies, more resources for regions and municipalities, and one meagre social democratic proposal: a ‘family week’ which gives parents three days off to spend with their children during the school holidays.

The pact was a major achievement for the Centre and Liberals, who got the SAP to accept a number of policies which had been ruled out by the Moderate-led coalition of 2006-14. In exchange, the Social Democrats got the premiership and split the bourgeois bloc. The Left got nothing, apart from an insulting clause stating that they should have no influence on budgetary decisions. Yet its parliamentary support was necessary for the new government, and in the end it acquiesced to the SAP after intensive talks with Löfven.

The Swedish Left Party grew out of the Communist Party, which since 1964 was the pioneering ‘Eurocommunist’ formation avant la lettre: democratic, critical of the USSR, heterodox and intellectually engaged (it invited the editors of New Left Review to one of its seminars in the 1960s). A small party polling at 4–5%, it was quickly overwhelmed by international headwinds: the invasion of Czechoslovakia (which it condemned), the spread of Maoism, and post-1968 neocommunism. But it survived amid these difficulties, and from 1990 began the process of social democratization, completed after roughly two decades of internal conflict and external anti-communist bombardment. Today, the party sees itself as heir to an earlier form of social democracy, though it rejects the radical independent internationalism of Olof Palme, adhering to a conventional liberal worldview. Jonas Sjöstedt, its leader from 2012 to 2020, became one of the most popular politicians in the country, while his successor, Nooshi Dadgostar – a Sweden-born woman of Iranian descent – has earned respect from her confrontations with the SAP. With a vote of 8% in the 2018 election and a consistent programme of left social democratic, feminist and ecological reformism, the party has performed better than its Eurocommunist counterparts in Italy, France and Spain.

Upon signing the arrangement with Löfven, the Left issued a warning. If the government ever tried to change job security legislation or abolish rent controls, it would immediately call a no-confidence vote. The Social Democrats skilfully avoided the labour rights controversy, getting the two biggest unions to sign a new agreement with employers which relaxed job security in exchange for other provisions: the right to a permanent job after three years of temporary employment, and a publicly financed right to retraining and ‘competence development’. But last month the issue of rent controls appeared on the agenda, with a parliamentary committee proposing market rents in new housing developments. The SAP claimed it was in favour of continued rent controls in principle, but accepted the committee’s recommendation because of its 73-point agreement with the neoliberal parties. To Löfven’s surprise, the Left reminded him of its red line from 2019 and prepared a no-confidence motion. The conservative opposition parties – who are in favour of market rents – opportunistically joined the Left, and the political crisis was detonated. At this point, the Swedish constitution gave the Prime Minister two options. He could resign, prompting negotiations moderated by the Speaker to find a PM acceptable to parliament (which would give Löfven the chance to reassemble a majority); or he could call a snap election. Last Monday he announced his resignation.

Sweden’s parliamentary crisis raises various questions about the condition of centre-left politics, the fortunes of European social democracy and the weakness of the left, which may at least be outlined here. While social democracy has suffered a general breakdown rooted in the mutations of finance capitalism, today’s centre-left parties are facing highly differentiated problems and prospects. An understanding of this can be gained by locating the parties in their various democratic systems.

The smoothest terrain lies in front of the Anglo Labour parties of Australia, Britain and New Zealand, which inhabit one part of a (largely) two-party landscape, fortified by first-past-the-post electoral systems. Once a party has gained a seat at a two-party table, under these rules it is likely to win power sooner or later. It may lose its position, as the British Liberals did, but that requires the rise of a new, cohesive, self-conscious class (e.g. the industrial working class in the early 20th century), and the Anglo Labour parties have already taken out middle-class insurance against any repetition of this process. Last October, NZ Labour captured just over 50% of all votes, up 13% since 2017.

Another decent bet on the future of social democracy is the Iberian model, where the centre-left can claim to represent the nation’s democratic transition. In Spain and Portugal, the main right-wing opponents of the government are about the same size as the ruling party, operating in a system of proportional representation. In both cases they have recently overcome the liberal taboo against cooperating with the radical left, thereby gaining some autonomy from the centre-right.  

Meanwhile, the once powerful Nordic welfare state-builders have lost their parliamentary dominance, most likely for ever. They are now cut down to between 20% and 30% of the vote, with the Finnish falling even below that. But they are in competition with a disparate set of centre-right parties, which sometimes allows them to occupy a pivotal position despite their weak poll ratings – hence the social democratic-led coalitions of Denmark, Finland and (until recently) Sweden. More than their sister parties, these organizations have also retained something of their working-class and popular roots.

The mid-European coalition parties – in Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland – are located in polycentric political systems of proportional representation, and are accustomed to serving in government. These parties have played a part in the development of national and local welfare states, though often a constricted and subordinate one. They will probably keep this modest role; although the Dutch Labour Party in particular has seen a drop-off in support, gaining only 5.7% of the vote in the two latest elections.

Two grand social democratic parties – in Austria and Germany – are in great trouble, facing unified bourgeois blocs of (mainly Catholic) Christian Democracy. Without the protection of a Westminster-style electoral system, they are in danger of being relegated to third-party status. German polls are currently showing the SPD placed well below the Greens. The historical core of European social democracy is unlikely to play any leading domestic political role in the near future.

Social democracy returned to Eastern Europe mainly thanks to converted communists, but their principal contribution to post-Soviet society has been liberal EU-philia and NATO-fication, rather than social democratic reforms. This imbalance between foreign policy and popular domestic concerns has cost the converts dearly. Social questions have become the preserve of hard-right conservatives, whose popular support has steadily risen. Almost all social democratic parties of Eastern Europe have also been involved in corruption scandals at the highest level. Only in the smallest and the poorest countries in the Balkan periphery – primarily Albania and North Macedonia – could social democracy conceivably retain substantial influence in the coming years.

Finally, we have the casualties: parties lethally wounded in Italy, France and Greece. In all three, but most of all in Italy, the whole party system has become unhinged and volatile. In Italy the PCI and the PSI both dissolved in the early 1990s. The socialists have virtually disappeared, while the prolonged dilution of Italian communism has all but severed its roots in the labour movement. Nonetheless, the Partito Democratico – with its changeable political colours – remains a significant player in the coalition games of this fractured party system.

In France, the Socialist party which carried Mitterand to power was formed only in 1971, and in the presidential election of 2017 its candidate was supported by 6.4% of voters. But it is likely that a new, potentially significant centre-left party of the highly educated middle-classes – Piketty’s ‘Brahmins’ – will soon be established. In Greece, PASOK is trying to regroup by gathering some other centre-left currents into the so-called Movement for Change. The standard-bearer for centre-left decline, PASOK is Europe’s only social democratic party clearly overtaken by a more progressive challenger – apart perhaps from Ireland’s Labour Party, now languishing behind Sinn Féin. Only in southern Europe have significant new left parties and movements emerged in this century: Syriza in Greece, the Five Star Movement in Italy, La France Insoumise, Podemos in Spain, the Left Bloc in Portugal. But for the time being, their way forward seems limited. With no majority in sight for any of these parties, parliamentary manoeuvring and extra-parliamentary politics are their only foreseeable future.

Sweden’s political turmoil is far from over. Löfven – more disposed to compromise than to fight – is hoping to return as premier after new rounds of horse-trading. His chances are slightly better than 50%. The parties which previously backed him as Prime Minister – the SAP, Centre, Left, Environment Party – have 175 seats against the conservative opposition’s 174. But given the Left’s withdrawal, there are MPs in the former bloc whose vote, or even presence, is uncertain. Löfven will be able to return to the role of PM unless there is a majority against him. But in order to get a budget passed he needs to have a majority himself – and the Centre has again refused to countenance any budget negotiations with the Left.

The government coming out of the new Speaker Rounds will probably be even more right-wing than the one which fell on 21 June – either because the conservatives will win the premier lottery, or because the neoliberal Centre will have extorted further concessions from the SAP. The Left, however, can be satisfied that it has stopped the abolition of rent controls for the time being, and improved its poll ratings by refusing to cross its red line. Commentators expect that if a new Löfven government is eventually established, it will have to give something meaningful to Dadgostar in order to get its budget passed.

The Swedish crisis therefore demonstrates the space that still exists for political manoeuvre among the representatives of Nordic social democracy, embedded in multi-party systems with divided right and centre-right parties. Yet the current parliamentary distribution of power in the European systems of proportional representation creates dilemmas for traditional social democrats, as well as newer left groupings: dilemmas between, on one hand, pragmatic negotiations, compromises and influence; and on the other, robust programmes, principles and isolation. Effective politics in these contexts requires a dose of both, but a stable equilibrium between them is elusive.

European social democracy got a second chance at power in the 1990s, after the first neoliberal shockwave in the East as well as in the West. After some initial success, it squandered this opportunity – possibly forever – through tone-deaf neoliberal adaptations. The Third Way produced xenophobic populism and a new hard right while also showing the weakness and narrowmindedness of the left. In Sweden, Dadgostar’s invocation of industrial-society social democracy may have some short-term tactical advantage but is hardly an adequate response to the complex 21st-century challenges facing any socialist project. If such parties are to overcome the dilemmas thrown up by divided parliaments, more creativity will be required.

Read on: Göran Therborn, ‘Twilight of Swedish Social Democracy’, NLR 113.

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Crypto-Politics

Philosophy in the so-called ‘analytic’ tradition has a strange relationship with politics. Normally seen as originating with Frege, Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein in the early 20th century, analytic philosophy was originally concerned with using formal logic to clarify and resolve fundamental metaphysical questions. Politics was largely ignored, according to the Oxford analyst Anthony Quinton, before the late 1960s. Political philosophy, in fact, was routinely pronounced ‘dead’ at the hands of the analysts – so dead that the tepid output of John Rawls (whose A Theory of Justice was published in 1971) could appear as a revival.

At the same time, analytic philosophers were not uninterested in politics. Bertrand Russell is an especially well-known case, but other figures such as A. J. Ayer and Stuart Hampshire – both supporters of the Labour Party (and in Ayer’s case, later the Social Democratic Party) and critics of the Vietnam War – were also politically involved. The reluctance to engage with politics in their professional capacities might seem thus to reflect not lack of political interest, but a view of philosophy as a largely separate sphere. Russell, for example, wrote that his ‘technical activities must be forgotten’ in order for his popular political writings to be properly understood, while Hampshire argued that although analytic philosophers ‘might happen to have political interests, […] their philosophical arguments were largely neutral politically.’

While at times insistent on the detachment of their philosophy from politics – stretching to a pride in the ‘conspicuous triviality’ of their own activity that the critic of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ Ernest Gellner saw as requiring the explanation of social historians – the analysts at other times floated some quite strong claims as to the political value and potential of their own ways of doing things. As Thomas Akehurst has shown, ‘many of the leading British analytic philosophers of the post-war period made it clear that they took analytic philosophy to be in alliance with liberalism’ and ventured that certain analytic ‘habits of mind’ – in particular those associated with the ‘empiricist’ school dominant at that time – might offer a crucial protective against various forms of ‘fanaticism’.

It was less clear how this was supposed to work. The analysts’ own pronouncements on the relationship between their philosophy and politics seem to amount to little more than a declaration of a monopoly on openness, a boast of humility, a set of dogmatic and opaque assertions about the inhospitability of the analytic method to dogma and opacity (‘no-bullshit bullshit’, to borrow the moniker later bestowed on the so-called ‘no bullshit’ school of ‘analytical Marxism’ by its critics). ‘Empiricism is hostile to humbug and obscurity, to the dogmatic authoritative mood, to every sort of ipse dixit’, the Oxford philosopher H. H. Price had written already in 1940: ‘The same live-and-let-live principles […] are characteristic of liberalism too.’ In a similar vein, in his 1950 essay ‘Philosophy and Politics’, Russell describes empiricism (‘the scientific outlook’) as ‘the intellectual counterpart of what is, in the practical sphere, the outlook of liberalism’, and hailed Locke as the exemplification of the ‘order without authority’ allegedly central to both philosophies.

Between them, Russell and Price seem to be suggesting a series of links between 1. clarity, 2. the rejection of epistemic authority (amounting to a value of ‘thinking for yourself’); and 3. the rejection of political authoritarianism, a rejection which is assimilated to 4. liberalism, seemingly interchangeable with 5. democracy. Besides the looseness of the conceptual links in this chain, there are questions to be asked about its attachment to reality: about the relationship of these assertions by the analysts to actual analytic philosophy and philosophers, and to actual liberalism and liberals respectively. When Price lauds an intellectual culture ‘of free, co-operative inquiry, in which anyone may put forward any hypothesis he likes, […] provided it makes sense’ (which presumably means: makes sense to analytic philosophers), he evokes an image of a non-hierarchical, egalitarian discipline that is likely to strike those with experience of the culture of analytic philosophy as something of an idealization, to say the least. As for liberalism, Locke, and ‘order without authority’: what can you say, apart from maybe, ‘Don’t mention the slavery’?

Here we touch on another aspect of the analysts’ inchoate claim to offer a protective against political vice or misadventure. This is the wariness of ‘ideology’ and ‘theory’ (especially of the ‘grand’ variety). As Akehurst parses it, the idea is that a ‘focus on the concrete saves the empiricist from following grand theories, metaphysical chimeras and other strictly meaningless exhortations to devalue reality in favour of dangerous ideological fantasy.’ The thought here is intuitive enough, and liberals are not the only ones to feel its force – something like it is a theme of much anarchist writing, for instance. Yet whatever is to be said about it, it cannot be so simple as ‘Theory bad, Reality good.’ Rigid adherence to ideals, theories or principles can play its part in the commission of atrocities. But, first, what entitles liberals to the assumption that it is only other people who have ‘theories’? And second, can’t there be a converse and equal danger in the lack of fixed principles? Is ‘never torture’ a dangerous piece of dogma? Is it better to cast off such ideological baggage and keep all options on the table, doing as the facts of the situation (as we see them) demand? Liberalism’s history, in any case, boasts its fair share of terrible deeds committed both in the service of ‘grand ideals’ (for what else can we call ‘Liberty’?) as well as in response to the more ‘concrete’ considerations of expedience and profit.

If on the one hand analytic philosophy has presented itself as politically neutral, it has also regarded this very neutrality – this supposed freedom from dogma and ‘ideology’ – as the guarantor of liberal political conclusions. Analytic political philosophy, which has flourished and proliferated since the later part of the twentieth century, has preserved this basic posture. I wrote about this in my first book, The Political Is Political. What struck me about analytic political philosophy as a student (and what my tautological title was meant to capture) was that the subject was both paradoxically depoliticized and also political in covert ways. Under the influence of Rawls in particular, political philosophers have had remarkably little to say about actual politics or history. Armed with a sharp distinction between ‘descriptive’ and ‘normative’ (or ‘is’ versus ‘ought’), characteristic of the analytic approach, they have judged that such matters are the appropriate domain of social scientists. By contrast, the distinctive business of philosophers is to concentrate on the articulation of abstract ‘principles of justice’, often in the form of ‘ideal theory’. The contemporary political philosopher Charles Mills, while a self-identified adherent of the liberal-analytic approach, has criticized ideal theory as a form of ‘ideology’ in a loosely Marxist sense: a distortion of thought that reinforces an oppressive status quo by sanitizing and distracting from its ‘non-ideal’ features (Mills emphasises, in particular, the history and legacy of slavery in the United States).

Not only do philosophers in this tradition neglect real politics, I argued, but they also operate with a series of ostensibly neutral or ‘common sense’ methodological values  – ‘constructiveness’, ‘reasonableness’, ‘charity’ in argument – which invariably turn out, on closer inspection, to be interpreted in such a way as to favour liberal conclusions in advance, ‘begging the question’ against dissenting perspectives that might call for a more radical deviation from the political status quo. The injunction to ‘Be realistic!’, for example, commands virtually universal assent (who wants to be ‘unrealistic’?) but tells us nothing useful until filled out with some judgements as to what ‘reality’ is like and how it might be changed.

These, of course, are exactly the sorts of questions that are in dispute between people of different political outlooks. But what tends to happen in political philosophy, as in the wider world, is that taking account of reality is conflated with proposing less in the way of change, so that ‘realism’ and radicalism are assumed to be in inherent tension. Thus, while the ‘realist’ current in contemporary political philosophy is in one sense a challenge to the dominant approach (of ignoring real history and politics), it often ends up further entrenching a status quo bias, by equating ‘realism’ with small-c ‘conservatism’ and positioning ‘ideal theory’ as the peak of radical ambition.

Illusions of political neutrality, whether within the confines of academia or outside of it, are always deeply political, and usually conservative. (Think of the role that a faux-neutral, supposedly common-sense notion of ‘electability’ has played in British political discourse in recent years.) The answer, as I argued in the case of analytic political philosophy, is not to try to replace false neutrality with a ‘true’ one. The idea that this is possible, let alone desirable, is itself illusory. Judgements and assumptions about what is important, what kind of place the world is and what it could or should become – which is to say, political judgements and assumptions – are always and already embedded in the concepts and values we use to make and evaluate statements and arguments in philosophy and elsewhere. If there is an affinity between analytic philosophy and liberalism, it is perhaps in their mutual tendency to project this sort of illusion – to proceed as if their politics is no politics at all, just ‘realism’, or ‘common sense’. From this vantage point, the opponents of analytic philosophy and of liberalism can only appear respectively as obscurantists and fanatics. It’s no surprise, therefore, that some prominent analysts (Russell among them) became such ardent Cold Warriors.

The observation of G. J. Warnock, in 1958, that analytic philosophy was compatible with ‘a quite striking ideological range’ is clearly true, though Warnock also conceded that ‘there may be some deep-seated similarity of attitude and outlook’ not easily detectable to those who share in it. The political flavour of the school has been predominantly liberal, but it has not been exclusively so (think of analytic Marxists such as G. A. Cohen, or the radicals among the earlier ‘Vienna Circle’ of logical positivists). ‘Liberalism’, in any case, has meant (and continues to mean) different things to different people. Also like liberalism, ‘analytic philosophy’ is a slippery enough category to be resistant to any definitive characterization. It is not that analytic philosophy has any particular, fixed political content or valence. But its tendency toward ahistoricism and abstraction creates a vacuum at its heart, into which comes rushing, too often, too easily and too quietly, the dominant politics of the day. 

Read on: Lorna Finlayson, ‘Rules of the Game?’, NLR 123.

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True Colours

The hopes of the Brazilian left were dashed earlier this month, when the national football team published a statement which criticized President Bolsonaro’s decision to host the Copa America during the pandemic, but confirmed that it would nonetheless participate.

For many in Brazil, this was the latest step in a progressive separation from their fabled national team. Few images are more emblematic of the country than the bright yellow shirt worn by Pelé and the 1970s generation. When Brazilians abroad are asked where they come from, the answer usually invites comments about famous goals and matches. Yet the connection between Brazilians and their seleção is more complex than this might suggest. Football is not easily disentangled from politics, which currently means an affiliation with Bolsonaro.

The ongoing Copa America – the main South American football competition – marks the nadir of the tense relationship that has developed over the last decade between the national team and the general public. So far, the matches have attracted miniscule TV audiences: smaller than those who tune in to watch a Sunday variety show presented by a substitute host, or a second-rate Christian soap opera. That the seleção inspires indifference is all the more striking given its quality, which has improved significantly since its notorious defeat by Belgium in 2018. There is no denying the talent of its current roster – Neymar Jr, Vini Jr, Alisson, Firmino, Gabriel Jesus and so on.

To understand the team’s poor public perception we must go back to the 2013 rebellion. Having won the previous elections with a large mandate, the Worker’s Party (PT) was delivering solid growth rates while reducing inequality and unemployment. It was also preparing to host Brazil’s first World Cup since 1950: an opportunity to redress the historic upset of losing to Uruguay that year. But before the games got underway, a heterogeneous coalition took to the streets under the slogan Não vai ter Copa – ‘There will be no Cup’. The movement highlighted the low level of investment in public services compared to the extravagant cost of the new FIFA-standard stadiums. It challenged the gradualism of the PT’s reforms, stressing the limits of the redistributive model conceived by Lula and continued by Rousseff.  

In an attempt to justify the R$8 billion spent on stadiums alone, the famed former player Ronaldo patronizingly told protesters, ‘You can’t host a World Cup with hospitals, you need stadiums.’ But in the end, the majority of Brazilians got neither. When the stadiums were constructed, exorbitant ticket prices meant that the audiences were overwhelmingly rich and white. Working-class fans were excluded from the sporting cathedrals that their tax money had built. Their absence was supposed to free up space for comfortable seats and new services. The Maracanã, for instance, had once been the biggest football venue in the world, hosting almost 200,000 people – yet by 2014 its capacity had been reduced to under 80,000. (Despite this, the gentrification of Brazilian stadiums has not gone as planned; many of them have proved too expensive to maintain, and now sit half empty during most of the year.) If this sowed disillusionment with the sport, Brazil’s humiliating 7–1 defeat to Germany in the semi-final redoubled it. From that point on, the seleção could no longer be held up as a symbol of national pride.

The 2014 World Cup was also an important moment in the arm-wrestle between football fans and capital. Traditionally, Brazilian clubs are not-for-profit associations; but in practice they are run by privileged groups of amateur managers known as cartolas – or ‘top hats’. Within most clubs, the struggle between this cadre and the fanbase is opaque, and the latter are generally not allowed to vote in internal elections. Even so, Brazilian football has historically resisted the top-down management structures of stock exchange-listed European clubs, which have reduced their fans to mere consumers. Investors saw the World Cup as a golden opportunity to impose this model on Brazil and ‘modernise’ the sport at club level. Business-friendly legislation allowing clubs to become for-profit limited liability companies is currently being considered by the Congress.

After 2014, the national team’s iconic yellow shirt became indelibly associated with the elite layers that swarmed the stadiums. A clear chromatic code separated broadly progressive demonstrations – for better public services, against the parliamentary coup that toppled Rousseff – from proto-fascist rallies against the imaginary communist threat. The first were red, the second yellow and green. Today, wearing the official shirt of the seleção on the streets of Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo is an overtly pro-Bolsonaro statement. 

In this context, the 2021 Copa America was an opportunity to redeem the national team. The tournament was originally set to be co-hosted by Colombia and Argentina, but it was relocated due to social unrest in the former and escalating Covid-19 cases in the latter. Brazil was hardly immune from either of these issues. Yet Bolsonaro’s administration unhesitatingly accepted a last-minute offer to host the event, while at the same time failing to answer 53 communications from Pfizer offering its much-needed vaccines. The move was widely condemned, with only 24% of the population supporting it. Opposition from sports commentators was virtually unanimous.

For a brief moment, it seemed likely that the seleção would rehabilitate itself by refusing to participate in Bolsonaro’s vanity project. Following the president’s announcement, the team captain Carlos Casimiro told journalists that the players would issue a response ‘at the right time’. Expectation mounted for a week, with opposition politicians tweeting that ‘Casimiro is our captain!’ Then, on 9 June, just five days before the kick-off, their tepid statement was published. ‘We are against organizing the Copa America’, it said, ‘but we will never say no to the Brazilian national team’.

This was a crushing disappointment. Yet in politics as in football, no defeat is definitive. Patently, Bolsonaro’s Copa America is an attempt to distract from the milestone of half a million coronavirus deaths and the growing resistance to his rule. With the 2022 elections to be held just a few weeks before the World Cup in Qatar, the seleção will undoubtedly return to the national spotlight soon. They may even be called upon to pick a side if, as some commentators are predicting, Bolsonaro uses the spectre of electoral fraud to orchestrate a military coup. At that point, the team’s true colours will be clear.

Read on: Benjamin Markovits, ‘The Colours of Sport’, NLR 22.

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Memory Lapse

In his Sidecar essay ‘Eros After Covid’, Alex Colston asks what psychoanalysis can teach us about living in the wake of a plague year, drawing on Beyond the Pleasure Principle to suggest how we might restimulate our desire after a period in which time itself has seemingly stopped. ‘Freud’s schema for mourning such an experience is counterintuitive’, writes Colston, ‘if not outright scandalous, because it depends on what we might consider a social vice: narcissism.’ It is only through recovering our ‘narcissistic satisfactions’ that we can overcome the loss of time, plus the friends and relatives that may have passed with it. After a prolonged stasis in which various malformations of the psyche have been left to fester, narcissism is the only route back to Eros – ‘that troublemaker that sends us into the world to bind new associations’.

Yet if the basic satisfactions of existing are the cure for melancholia, self-love can also carry side-effects. Colston notes that when Freud ‘invokes the timeless imperative to “love thy neighbour as thyself”, he invites an obvious Freudian rejoinder: ‘that we hardly know ourselves, and that to reduce another person to the poorly taken measure of your own self is likely to miss the other person entirely.’ Narcissism can only be the precondition for binding new associations once it accepts a certain level of ignorance about its object. You can only know – let alone love – your neighbour when you admit that you don’t know yourself. Fortunately, given the psychic uncertainty engendered by the long 2020, this is an admission that more people are now willing to make.

Colston’s paradox – in which disconnection from oneself facilitates connection with others – is likely to be a prominent feature of post-lockdown life. It is also the premise of a recent film about pandemics, mourning and time lapses by the Greek director Christos Nikou. Born in 1984, Nikou studied cinema in Athens before landing a job as an assistant to Yorgos Lanthimos, collaborating with him on his breakthrough drama Dogtooth (2009). His directorial debut, Km (2012), was a ten-minute Greek New Wave experiment, capturing a slow, strained conversation between a couple who sit in the front of a stationary car while blood inexplicably appears on their bodies. The short film’s most unsettling feature was its scrambled chronology (the halting dialogue is followed by a still image of a car crash, then a shot of the couple driving down a country road); so it seems appropriate that Nikou’s first full-length work, Apples, should be strangely premonitory. Though it was released on the festival circuit in autumn 2020, and screened in UK cinemas last month, Apples was shot at the beginning of 2019, and can therefore be added to the list of cultural artefacts that unwittingly anticipated Covid (Soderbergh’s Contagion, Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Sweeney-Baird’s The End of Men, among many others).

Apples is set in Athens during the early days of a pandemic in which the infected find that their memory has been suddenly and permanently erased. Unable to recall their own names, they experience an extreme version of the self-dislocation Colston describes – losing not just a lockdown year but an entire lifetime. Some of them are re-adopted by their families, but others are forced to enrol in a state-run ‘New Identity Programme’. They are given an apartment, a cash allowance, and a cassette player on which to listen to the instructions of their supervisors – a team of doctors who monitor the amnesiacs’ progress with sinister intensity. The chief physician tells them, first, how to revive their narcissistic satisfactions. A number of solitary activities must be performed to reaffirm the value of living: riding a bike, hiking in the countryside, going to the cinema. Then, once those experiences have congealed into something like an ego, the patients are enjoined to interact with others: attending parties, visiting strip clubs and finding candidates for one-night-stands. They are loaned a polaroid camera with which to capture each of these tasks, the photos slotted into an album that is regularly inspected by the New Identity officials.

At times the patients’ participation in the programme appears no more than dutiful: one scene shows a string of people filing out of a horror film and photographing themselves standing vacantly beside the movie poster. This drudgery is reflected in Apples’ washed-out palette, which moves between the dust-grey streets of the Greek capital and the drab interiors of the New Identity apartments, avoiding the typical shots of classical ruins – as if to imply that the city itself has lost its memory. But there is also something compulsive about the patients’ need to fulfil the next challenge, complete the next mission: as if they are moving up the levels of a video game. With the slate wiped clean by the pandemic, the impulse to accumulate new experiences – layering one on top of the other until they produce a subjectivity – acquires an irresistible appeal. Eros, ‘the troublemaker’, responds to the loss of self-knowledge by seeking out novel intensities, cathecting any object it sets eyes on. Aris, the film’s protagonist, played by a severe and remote Aris Servetalis (best-known for his prizewinning performance in Babis Makridis’s 2012 comedy L), is drawn to this process of self-reinvention following the death of his wife. Although he escaped the virus, his grief leads him to envy those who have forgotten the past and rebuilt an identity ex nihilo. So one evening he boards a public bus, pretends to fall asleep and, upon reaching the final stop, tells the driver that he doesn’t know where he lives. He is taken to the hospital, where he deliberately fails a series of memory tests and gains a spot on the programme.

Yet, having outsourced his mourning to the medical agency, the widower gradually learns that their directives are not enough to recompose a selfhood. As he fills his photo album, the object comes to symbolize the disjointed model of ‘experience’ that the New Identity doctors promote: each moment is frozen in time, isolated on a different page, with nothing to thread them together. Once Aris has progressed to an advanced stage of the course, he is told by his physician that the tasks will now ‘get more complicated’. He is instructed to find a terminal patient in a hospital, visit them daily, attend their funeral, and temporarily move in with the bereaved family. He must also cause a car accident and photograph himself beside the wreckage. Emotional complexity becomes a stand-in for narrative cohesion. The affects he is prescribed grow increasingly potent and surreal – as Eros searches for fresh attachments to meet its infinite demands – but they do not form any kind of unity. Nor do they allow him to develop meaningful relationships, as the simple injunction to absorb experience leaves little room for empathy or reciprocity. (Aris’s brief romance with the female lead, Anna, played by Sofia Georgovassili, is jeopardized for this reason.) The two words of the programme’s title thus begin to tug against each other, as the ceaseless drive for novelty undermines the formation of identity. Sensing this limitation, the protagonist asks his doctors when they will release him. They reply that it will take ‘as long as it takes’. Without a narrative arc, the story of the libido becomes formless – and endless.

What Apples shows us, then, is a variant of the pandemic recovery sequence articulated by Colston: from lack of self-knowledge, to benign narcissism, to Erotic reattachment to the world. Yet the film also demonstrates that this may not be enough to establish what Alasdair McIntyre would call a narrative conception of the self – one which can complete the work of mourning by weaving the traumas of the past into the fabric of the present. When Aris is struggling to process the loss of his wife, this alienated condition does not prompt him to reflect upon his past (as psychoanalysis would advocate). Instead, he eradicates it entirely – going so far as to give up eating apples because he is told that they are ‘good for your memory’.

The upshot of this wilful forgetting is both a fragmentation of experience and a loss of agency. Whereas Colston asserts that narcissism must ultimately give way to an ‘ethics of care’ and ‘the growth of affective ties between people’, by the end of Apples, Aris’s main point of contact is with the doctors who direct his activities. In this alternate reality, a paternalist Greek state freed from Troika fiscal bondage gives generous housing entitlements and welfare payments to the amnesia victims. But such vertical ties between patients and their patrons are a weak substitute for the lateral ties which Colston envisions. Apples depicts a post-pandemic social settlement that is all too probable, in which a top-down ‘ethic of care’ supplants the different forms of community solidarity that emerged in the midst of the crisis.

Though it is politically resonant, at times this portrait of an affect-free society creates aesthetic problems for Nikou, who tries to offset the expressionless acting with a saccharine soundtrack from which his mentor Lanthimos would undoubtedly recoil. The camerawork, too, strives to break down Aris’s icy demeanour through constant closeups with a shallow depth of field, tempting us to search his features for a sign of what he’s feeling. Such formal tricks do not come off. And yet, despite Apples’ dystopian forecast, there are two glistening moments when Aris rejects both the foreclosure of the past and the flattening of interpersonal relations. The first is when he visits a bar with Anna and hears Chubby Checker’s ‘Let’s Twist Again’ playing over the sound system. We watch him edge towards the centre of the room and sway tentatively to the music. Then, within the space of a minute, he is dancing as fluently as Checker himself, his rigid and impassive manner radically transformed. This is not just a throwback to a late-fifties cultural meme; it is also a recurrence of something from Aris’s earlier life that he had tried to bury – a capacity that is reactivated by an affective experience which (unlike those imposed by the doctors) was not obligatory or pre-planned. When Aris steps outside the confines of the photo album, he creates this powerful interchange between past and present. He also makes an instant connection with his fellow dancers, as if there is a direct line between recovering his former self and learning to identify with others.

The second moment in which Aris shatters the logic of the New Identity Programme comes at the end of the film, when – on his doctor’s orders – he is feeding soup to a dying man in a hospital bed. The man asks whether Aris is married, and the latter admits, for the first time, that his wife has recently died. The confession seems totally involuntary, and the protagonist is so struck by it that he falls silent. He then returns home to the flat which he had previously abandoned, leaving his cassette player behind. The closing scene fades out while he refamiliarizes himself with this emblem of his past. If the bar episode showed the return of a repressed instinct which precipitated (as Colston would put it) ‘the growth of affective ties between people’, here the causality is reversed: Aris’s empathy with the old man triggers the sudden re-emergence of something bygone. An affective bond brings back what’s been forgotten. In both cases, temporal fragmentation and social atomization are surmounted in the same stroke. It is, Nikou suggests, somehow impossible to sustain a presentist existence while forging strong intersubjective attachments. The ‘community of feeling’, which Freud proposed as an antidote to the collective trauma of world wars and Spanish flu, is co-dependent on narratives which link now to then. After Covid we will bind new associations. But these will be fleeting, shallow, compulsive, if Eros is amnesiac.

Read on: Emma Fajgenbaum, ‘Cinema as Disquiet’, NLR 116/117.

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Diaspora Trouble

It goes down easily at first: a little slug of ice-cold bile in a big warm swig of Manischewitz. Most of Joshua Cohen’s new novel The Netanyahus unfolds between September 1959 and January 1960 on the campus of the imaginary Corbin University, in pastoral Chautauqua County, a region that ‘dismissive, geographically-illiterate New York City-folk’ call ‘Upstate’, according to the book’s narrator, Professor Ruben Blum. Cohen evokes the bucolic campus world of this era with a fluent satiric touch, playing off trademark details – kitschy props, (pipes, gimlets, a Hide-a-Bed), academic banter and undergraduate hijinks – in a tone that shifts between semi-realist and wild slapstick. The dialogue is snappy and interspersed with snicker-ready, drum-roll-to-cymbal one-liners. Superficially, the story is often a sort of breezy hoot. But grave questions and menacing true-life figures lurk about the novel from its inception to the end. ‘Eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate you’, reads the epigraph, a citation from Ze’ev Jabotinsky, father figure of the Revisionist Zionist movement to which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu’s Likud Party is heir. Netanyahu situated his own political project in Jabotinksy’s hegemonistic lineage, and it is the problem not just for Israel but for Jewish identity as such posed by the Netanyahu clan’s authority that gives the novel its raison d’etre.

The sixth novel of the prolific, wide-ranging American writer, The Netanyahus tracks a visit paid by the historian Benzion Netanyahu (a lightly fictionalized version of the recently deposed Israeli Prime Minister’s actual father) to Corbin University in pursuit of a job. He comes with his wife Tzila and their three sons: Jonathan, Benjamin and Iddo. They are a uniformly horrific bunch and wreak something worse than havoc on their hosts, the Blums. In the novel’s credits, Cohen informs us that the core of the story was recounted to him as fact by Harold Bloom, to whom the book is dedicated, and who himself served as campus coordinator for the real-life Netanyahus’ once-upon-a-time visit to Cornell, when the scholar of medieval Judaism was struggling both to establish himself professionally and to promote his reactionary brand of Zionism in the States.

Despite their homonymic names, Blum is no Bloom, but rather a modest expert in the history of American taxation, who wears galoshes and is a scrupulous, obliging character whose colleagues project upon him Pnin-ish tendencies. In Blum’s case, however, the fragility of his orientation is a factor of his status in Corbindale, where, as the hamlet’s only Jews, he and his wife, stalwart, sympathetic Edith, along with their quite dreadful daughter Judith, ‘faced regular slights’ more passive than aggressive. At the university, where Edith works as a librarian, these condescensions can be especially barbed. Still, Blum is grateful for the changes toward at least greater tolerance that have emerged in the United States since his youth, and at the outset of the book, set in our own time, he surveys, benignly, the further advances that have been made toward enfranchising different marginal communities in recent years. The list of Blum’s own publications makes evident that he has been able to use his seemingly arid, hard-fact driven field to shine fresh light on issues vital to social progress, from abolitionism to the suffragist movement. He sees through that American exceptionalism whereby, as he recounts, the past was only ‘the process by which the present was attained, and the present merely the most current stage of the American superlative, to be overtaken by tomorrow’s liberation and capital’s spread, until the ultimate transfiguration of world history into world democracy’. But Blum mistrusts this view only for its quasi-theological grandiosity. He aligns himself with milder forms of meliorism – indeed seems to treasure the notion of a reasonable open-endedness to the country’s destiny.

Blum’s dismissal of the most extreme, expansionist view of American history though pales before his revulsion at what he was taught as a child in Hebrew school. What was offered up there as history ‘was closed: it was no history, there was no past, no present, no future. Rather, there was time, as round and perfect as the earth, which from the moment it emerged from God’s spoken light had been marked by a constant repetition, not of seasons or harvests…but of oppression, violence and death’. The ‘gaunt, shuffly rabbis’ who instructed him in his youth in the Bronx, presented every persecutor of the Jewish people throughout time as fungible ‘avatars of Amalek, Israel’s original enemy from the deserts’. Eventually, they make clear, there will surely be an American Amalek to contend with as well. As it turns out, the teachings of the rabbis of Blum’s youth prefigure the vision laid out by Benzion Netanyahu.

Blum is a recent transplant to Corbin University – his wife and daughter are still smarting at their move to the sticks. His wife is bored. The daughter is foul-tempered. Blum’s home is fragile. One day, Dr. Morse, his Department Chair, calls him into his office for a cocktail and explains that he has been chosen as a kind of chaperone-consultant for Dr. Netanyahu’s candidacy and campus visit, despite the fact that Blum is an American historian and Netanyahu is a European Medievalist. Can Netanyahu integrate, Morse wants to know, and though he dances around the topic a bit, his decision to saddle Blum with the job comes down to the fact of both men being Jews. Ethnic kinship gives Blum (Morse hopes), inherent advantages in appraising the Israeli’s character; and regardless (Morse makes clear), freights Blum with special obligations. Blum raises objections but these are swiftly, firmly subdued; and so the ground is sown for the entry of a whirling abomination in familial form into Blum’s delicate professional-domestic sphere.

Even before the Netanyahus arrive, Blum’s distaste for his appointed role has been piqued by his preparatory reading of the applicant’s work in which the introductions ‘read like conclusions’, and the conclusions ‘read like prayers’. What rankles Blum as he studies Netanyahu’s writings about the Spanish Inquisition is the way that the author appears to be trafficking in dogma gussied up as history. Using arguments from the real-life Benzion Netanyahu’s problematic but not entirely discredited major work The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain as the basis for Blum’s encounter with the scholar’s writing, Cohen allows his protagonist to expound on how Netanyahu is actually flaunting religious gospel under the guise of facts.

Netanyahu’s research focused on the Church’s decision to begin effectively de-converting Jews who had cast off their native religion to become Catholics. Blum doesn’t challenge Netanyahu’s evidence for this claim, but rather lambasts the professor’s interpretation of the move, which, in his telling, amounted to the Catholics’ abiding need to maintain a population it was compulsory to hate, for which reasons ‘the Jews had to remain a people doomed to suffer’. The anti-Semitism of the Inquisition was not genuinely doctrinal then, but racist in a modern sense. While declaiming on anti-Semitism in Medieval Iberia, Netanyahu is really discussing Nazi Germany. Thus, like the shuffly rabbis of Blum’s childhood, the Israeli academic presented time ‘as a chain of changes that are visited down upon us by the will of God’. Only in Netanyahu’s case, the power of transformation was attributed not to divine whim, but to the world’s innumerable, invariably Jew-hating gentiles who were ‘constantly judging the Jews and oppressing them, and effecting change through their oppressions: converting them, unconverting them, massacring and expelling’. This view of matters, cleansing the past of particularity in favour of timeless axioms, chimes with the novel’s epigraph. History becomes merely a zero-sum game in which any dilution of a person’s primal, ethno-religious identity means death – a type of death, moreover, that’s contagious to the tribal collective as well. Though Cohen never says ‘eliminate Zion or Zion will eliminate you’, that obverse face of Jabotinksy’s pronouncement seems a plausible deduction within the novel’s logic.

Much of the book’s middle section returns to Blum’s home life and much of this is schtick and schlock. We hear a good deal from Blum’s comically old-fashioned father and Edith’s gauchely snobbish mother. Blum’s daughter Judith’s revulsion at her Jewish nose leads to a violently grotesque scene in which she tricks her grandfather into destroying this organ with a door – thereby forcing her parents to give her the nose job they’ve been resisting. (Her lust to deny the particularity of her Jewish history by means of full-on physiological assimilation appears just the flipside of the Jabotinsky/Netanyahu insistence on maintaining total ethnic purity.) The domestic scenes are intermittently funny and occasionally cruel, but often also feel facile – slick, period-piece rehearsals of mid-twentieth century American Jewish foibles. In their midst, Cohen provides a concise summary of Zionist history in relation to the rise of the revisionist brand of nationalism as religion. And then the Netanyahus arrive.

From the moment their half-wrecked car pulls up, blocking the Blums’ driveway, all five Netanyahus display a boorish grab-bag of ugly Jewish stereotypes. They exit their vehicle already screaming, fighting, screeching and raring to ruin. Father and mother, bundled in sheepskins, appear at first ‘indistinguishable and completely androgynous’. The whole family wear ‘identically furry toggle-clasped coats, hopefully bought in bulk at substantial discount’. Benzion is about fifty, ‘his face a tough nut of vaguely Mongol features’. (Later on, he’ll be described as having ‘hooded, steppe eyes’.) Tzila is ‘stocky, quiffhaired’, loud with malapropisms and thoughtless insults. Jonathan, Benjamin and Iddo, whose ages, 13, 10 and 7 respectively seem to be ‘the only disciplined and orderly thing about them’, immediately begin soiling and despoiling everything in their path. A couple of pages into their mess-making, Iddo’s diaper is being changed by Tzila in a maximally unhygienic manner while Benjamin leans over his younger brother ‘flicking at his penis’ before pointing at his diaper and saying ‘chocolate chip brownie fudge poop cookies’. Okay, he’s a kid. One can’t expect a revealing ideological disquisition. Nonetheless, the Grand Guignol the Netanyahus proceed to execute on the Blums, which culminates in diverse acts of property destruction as well as the sexual violation and possible rape of Judith by 13-year-old Jonathan (the future martyred hero of Entebbe), complete with Benjamin voyeuristically gawking at the door, seems to make such a cheap cartoon of the demonic tribe that everything about their characters is at once homogenized and trivialized. The way these children, whose careers will prove so momentous in Israel’s later history, appear as hollow puppet versions of their father’s Id points toward a greater moral difficulty with the book.

Ultimately, The Netanyahus suggests that dignity and real meaning arise from recognizing the myriad specificities of being. By honouring the humble, mundane humanity of each individual with their small quirks and homely passions, rather than subscribing to any overbearing, teleological theses, we may avoid history’s Great Mistakes, nationalistic-religious persecution of another community high among them. Fair enough. But the Netanyahus themselves are conflated into a single, transgenerational entity to make this point, and the blight they represent seems implicitly transferred from the father to the governing principle of Israel at large – the blight that makes Cohen take seriously the existential threat in the Jabotinsky quote he’s chosen for his epigraph.

The serious parts of the book’s latter sections centre on lectures and conversations in which Benzion Netanyahu thunderingly, contemptuously recapitulates his primary thesis. Though this doesn’t develop much conceptually beyond its initial formulation, Cohen is good at rendering the force of Netanyahu’s rhetoric about the eternal historical agon in which he envisions himself and his people as lead actors. Who could disagree that this approach is lethally deluded? But as a reflection on the political morass of contemporary Zion I’m not sure how far it takes us. For the father and the son are distinct in crucial ways, even if both men are reprehensible.

Near the end of the novel, in a passage of dialogue between Edith and Blum that provides the ethical counterweight to the message conveyed by the Netanyahu phenomenon, Edith recalls the seriousness and sincerity with which the couple had approached everything in their youth. ‘We were so earnest and principled but so intense, about democracy and love and death, as if we knew what those things were’. Now, having met ‘this horrible man and his horrible wife’ Edith has had a revelation, ‘I don’t believe in anything anymore and not just that, but I don’t care. I have no beliefs and I’m OK with it; I’m more than OK. I’m glad…I’m glad I’m getting older without convictions’. Blum concurs.

I lived in Jerusalem from the end of the 1980s through the time of Bibi Netanyahu’s first election as Prime Minister in the wake of Rabin’s assassination. His thuggery was always in evidence, although I think few people then would have been able to conceive how long he was to cling to power, presiding over the decimation of the Israeli left, the killing of thousands of Palestinians, the destruction of innumerable Palestinian homes, the exponential growth of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, the compromising of the national judiciary, the consummation of an apartheid system in a country once heralded as the only ‘true democracy’ in the Middle East. Given that he achieved all this in a highly fractured, intensely combative national political arena while under indictment in multiple corruption trials, even those who despise Netanyahu have sometimes conceded that he has a masterful instinct for political survival. This feat of endurance speaks in fact not to monolithic ideological rigidity but to expedient elasticity. Considering Netanyahu’s career some years ago I found myself thinking that he represented the most dangerous species of politician: he has the courage of his lack of convictions. In this sense, one might say that trumping even the Revisionist Zionism inherited from his ideologically absolutist father, Netanyahu embodies a bottomless nihilism not so different from that of the last American president, or the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Another way of looking at the crisis of Western democracy in recent years would be to say that there has, in fact, been a fatal shortage of convictions. Surely we can parse between varieties of convictions and champion those promoting values of justice, equality and freedom without sweeping the lot of them off the table as hopelessly tainted. The extraordinary cascade of protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder was driven by an irrepressible conviction that the impunity hitherto accorded police brutality could not be borne if even a nominal American democracy were to survive. Only a profound, even transcendent conviction of the role such wrongs play in perpetuating a history that, while not an endless repetition, is layered with correlative injustices could have inspired a movement that made systemic change feel tantalizingly within reach. In its less zealous iterations, the Jewish approach to time and history is similarly sedimentary; its different strata revealing patterns that resonate illuminatingly across the eras without strictly reproducing them.

Confronted by a slew of nihilistic, misery-profiteering ‘strong men’ leaders, armed with flexible propagandas, we must learn to differentiate between types of passionate, serious beliefs just as surely as between types of individuals and histories. Otherwise, farce will only ever be clocking time before becoming tragedy once again.

Read on: Nick Burns, ‘Chosen Nations’, NLR 124.

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Swexit

On May 26, the Swiss government declared an end to year-long negotiations with the European Union on a so-called Institutional Framework Agreement that was to consolidate and extend the roughly one hundred bilateral treaties now regulating relations between the two sides. Negotiations began in 2014 and were concluded four years later, but Swiss domestic opposition got in the way of ratification. In subsequent years Switzerland sought reassurance essentially on four issues: permission to continue state assistance to its large and flourishing small business sector; immigration and the right to limit it to workers rather than having to admit all citizens of EU member states; protection of the (high) wages in the globally very successful Swiss export industries; and the jurisdiction, claimed by the EU, of the Court of Justice of the European Union over legal disagreements on the interpretation of joint treaties. As no progress was made, the prevailing impression in Switzerland became that the framework agreement was in fact to be a domination agreement, and as such too close to EU membership, which the Swiss had rejected in a national referendum in 1992 when they voted against joining the European Economic Area.  

There are interesting parallels with the UK and Brexit. Both countries, in their different ways, have developed varieties of democracy distinguished by a deep commitment to a sort of majoritarian popular sovereignty that requires national sovereignty. This makes it difficult for them to enter into external relations that constrain the collective will-formation of their citizenry. Britain of course partly solved this problem by becoming the centre of an empire, as opposed to being included in one, defending its national sovereignty by appropriating the national sovereignty of others; while Switzerland became forever neutral and ready to defend itself, as de Gaulle had put it for France, tous azimuts. Constitutionally, British popular sovereignty resides in a parliament that is not bound by a written constitution and can therefore decide everything with a simple majority, no two-thirds or other supermajority ever required. Also, there is no constitutional court that could get in Parliament’s way, nor can the second chamber, the House of Lords. That a supreme court like the EU Court of Justice should be entitled to overrule the British parliament was always fundamentally incompatible with the British idea of democracy-cum-sovereignty, and became a major source of British popular discontent with the EU, leading to Brexit and undoing Brentry. Similarly, that a foreign court with foreign judges should be allowed to overrule a majority of the Swiss people proved incompatible with the Swiss idea of democracy, standing in the way of Swentry and thereby making a future Swexit dispensable.

Obviously, Switzerland is much smaller than Britain, and its national parliament has almost nothing to say. Whereas Britain is a highly centralized state, notwithstanding half-hearted, asymmetrical faux-federal devolution of governmental powers to three quasi-states, Switzerland, with just 8.7 million inhabitants, is a confederation of 26 cantons which have original rights to self-government and a strong voice at the federal level. Moreover, in something like the extreme opposite of Westminster democracy, the Swiss federal government has since 1959 been an Allparteienregierung, including the four largest parties represented in the parliament, with the head of government rotating annually between them – which is why nobody knows the name of the Swiss Prime Minister. The terminus technicus for this is Konkordanzdemokratie (concordance democracy). The way popular democracy comes in is through the established practice of plebiscites on just about anything, at the communal, the cantonal and the national level, binding whatever government is in charge. Add to this the communal exercises in direct democracy where, in some cantons, even the local government budget is voted upon by a citizen assembly, and you get the flavour of the popular, indeed populist, nature of Swiss democracy: a strong anti-hierarchical political culture when it comes to collective affairs, a deep-rooted sense of popular autonomy and its value for a good political life, and an equally deep-rooted suspicion of everybody who claims to know what is in the interest of the Swiss people better than, in their democratic wisdom, the Swiss people themselves.

So where does the EU come in? In both countries, a weird coalition of export-oriented manufacturing industries and the new class of the liberal left, or left-liberals, is attracted by the EU, to remain or to enter, respectively. In Britain that coalition was joined by part of the trade union movement, which was hoping for protection from Brussels against an untamed Conservative parliamentary majority, for less than fully intelligible reasons in light of the dismal social policy performance of Brussels. In Switzerland, by comparison, and perhaps to the surprise of those fond of their anti-Swiss stereotypes, the unions, still operating on the basis of the 1937 Peace Agreement in the metal industry, had enough domestic power, industrial and political, to oppose entry to the EU which, as they rightly feared, would result in pressure on their – high – wages. This turned them into allies of the country’s well-organized and politically powerful small business sector, whose prosperity is protected by a state industrial policy – in EU jargon: ‘state aids’ – which would in large part be illegal under EU competition law.

Otherwise, in Switzerland as in the UK, the ‘European project’ is a favourite of left-liberals, with Swiss joiners sharing with British Remainers a profound suspicion of popular-majoritarian politics. The Swiss liberal left claim that Swiss democracy is too slow, too localist, too provincial – in other words, too Swiss – compared to EU institutions, which are protected against the vagaries of citizen participation and firmly in the hands of a university-educated, ‘cosmopolitan’ elite of experts. Obviously this overlooks that Swiss politics has produced one of the world’s best infrastructures, with a legendary public transportation system and some of the leading universities. It also enabled the country to undertake huge civil engineering projects of Europe-wide importance, like the Gotthard Base Tunnel, adopted by referendum and completed in time and within budget, as part of a railway connection from Rotterdam to Genoa. While as European as possibly can be, the Swiss delivered the tunnel in international cooperation without any need for international hierarchy, only to discover that Germany’s part of the project, the railway route along the Rhine connecting the harbour of Rotterdam to the tunnel, is delayed by decades, EU membership notwithstanding.

If Swiss middle-class desire to be ruled by Brussels bureaucrats rather than their Swiss countrymen and women is more than a result of feelings of guilt for their national prosperity, or of an internalization of anti-Swiss sentiments that may easily be encountered everywhere in the world – then it probably has to do with the fact that plebiscitary-cum-confederal government allows for manifold niches and pockets of populist traditionalism, a kind of ‘diversity’ in sharp conflict with left-liberal ‘diverse’ values and lifestyles. Sometimes this can be quite embarrassing, for example when it took Switzerland until 1971, and in some cantons even longer, to extend the full franchise to women. Sentiments like those expressed by the Greens in Germany in the 1990s, in their slogan, ‘Dear foreigners, do not leave us alone with the Germans’, are widely present in parts of Swiss society today, especially in the cultural sector. Indeed, an astonishing number of Swiss cultural workers have emigrated to bohemian places like Berlin, where unlike Zurich no-holds-barred night-clubs can be found, in an effort to escape from the perceived puritan narrowness and even xenophobia of their home country – a home country, of course, with about 1.5 million foreign workers in all sectors of an economy employing 4.2 million, including no less than 340,000 daily commuters from Germany, France and Italy.

In Brussels, the Swiss dossier resides in the portfolio of Ursula von der Leyen, President of the Commission, who has inherited it from her predecessor, the now forgotten Jean-Claude Juncker. Her failure to make Switzerland capitulate weakens her position further, by once more laying bare the fault lines of the one-size-fits-all ‘ever closer union’. Pressured by imperial-centralist hardliners in the EU Parliament – and, one should assume, by the German and French national governments – the Commission is now threatening Switzerland with retaliation. Many of the existing treaties between the EU and Switzerland will be running out in coming years and will have to be renewed; others will need to be updated. The Swiss are told by the European bureaucracy that without the Framework Agreement this will be difficult and sometimes impossible, which would cost them dear. Less diplomatically, integrationists, frustrated by the Swiss refusal to proceed on the way to imperial unification of ‘Europe’ under German and French hegemony, are publicly speculating whether the Swiss are bad or mad: bad in being egoistically obsessed with keeping their riches to themselves instead of sharing them with deserving Europeans, as the Germans and the French of course habitually do (a last-minute offer by the Swiss delegation to contribute 1.3 billion euros over ten years to help lessen economic and social inequality within the EU[!] was rejected by the Commission) – or mad because unable to recognize their true interests, which obviously include being ruled by the good sense of the Commission and the EU Court of Justice. At the same time, they are occasionally also accused of being too clever by half, trying to get away with ‘cherry-picking’ – something children must never be allowed to do since they must learn to eat what comes to the table, all or nothing.

If the ‘European project’ is to advance as defined by Brussels centralists, it must be made clear to everyone concerned that confederal cooperation, bi- or multilateral, as an alternative to hierarchical domination is not on offer in Europe, as the British were taught, lest other countries, including those already members of the EU, get stupid ideas. Of course, in over seven hundred years of history, the Swiss have survived more testing challenges, as have the British in eight hundred years since the Magna Carta, and there are good reasons to believe that they will also – and in a much shorter period of time – survive the late-twentieth century Frankensteinian construct of merkato-technocracy called the European Union.

Read on: Jon Halliday, ‘Switzerland – The Bourgeois Eldorado’, NLR 1/56.